On Trading Truth for Transphobia
A trans alum of Northwestern University reflects on their capitulation to Trump.
Side by side headshots of the author on their 1990 Northwestern student ID and their 2024 US passport.
opinion by Pax Ahimsa Gethen
The year is 1991, and I’m a junior at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Walking through the student union, I notice a table with signage for National Coming Out Day. This is the first time I recall hearing about this annual event, which had only started a few years prior. I’d known since puberty that I wasn’t straight, but hadn’t found the right words or the right occasion to tell anyone about this. Seeing fellow students advertising that it was OK to be openly queer convinced me that yes, this was the time to come out as bisexual.
Back then, I was still living as a woman. Growing up in West Virginia and Pennsylvania in the 70s and 80s, I had virtually no exposure to – or understanding of – trans or nonbinary people. That wouldn’t come until many years later, after living in the more progressive San Francisco Bay Area. I gradually came to recognize and embrace my nonbinary transmasculine identity, and in 2013 I announced my new name to the world.
The year is 2025, and I’m reading story after story about the latest attacks on the trans community. Though stressful, this is not mere doomscrolling, but necessary to my volunteer work as a Wikipedia editor. One of the articles I’m helping maintain covers Trump’s actions against universities that don’t concede to the regressive and nonsensical demands of his administration. Today, I learned that the latest school to capitulate in order to get their research funding back is my own alma mater, Northwestern.
Reading about the university’s agreement with the transphobic definition of gender outlined in Trump’s executive order, while simultaneously claiming that they “unequivocally support” their trans community members, makes me sick to my stomach. The anti-trans policies stemming from this order primarily target trans women, but to define “woman” exclusively as a person who was assigned female at birth is to deny the authenticity of all trans people, transmasculine folks like myself included. I am not a woman, and with my bald head and facial hair I would not be welcome in most women’s spaces even if I wanted to be there. Regardless, a cis woman refusing to share space with a trans woman is no different – and no less wrong – than a white woman refusing to share space with a Black woman.
As a Black person whose gender transition coincided with the beginnings of the Black Lives Matter movement, I do not make the comparison between transphobia and racism lightly. I’ve learned a lot about the intersections of oppression since my time at Northwestern, when I was more conservative and considered myself to be “color blind”. Becoming a social justice advocate, much less undergoing a gender transition, couldn’t have been further from my mind at that time. The joke then was that the primary political sentiment at NU was “apathy”. When some protest marches were held on campus after the breakout of the Gulf War, only my one Black professor dismissed class so that we could join in if we chose to do so.
I thought about this time on campus when reading about the Trump administration characterizing all pro-Palestinian activities as antisemitic. These allegations of antisemitism are the main focus of news articles covering Trump’s shakedown of universities, Northwestern included. As someone with both Jewish and Black heritage, I was glad to see students at my alma mater engaging in encampments and related protests, and do not consider this criticism of Israel to be antisemitic. I see the Trump administration’s claim that they want to protect Jewish people as just as false and self-serving as their claim that they want to protect women. They are protecting patriarchy, exceptionalism, and white supremacy.
As a highly respected institution of higher learning, Northwestern University has the responsibility to teach the truth, not the hate-fueled misinformation peddled by the Trump administration. The university cannot honestly claim to support the trans community while adhering to discriminatory and unscientific definitions of sex and gender. I’m greatly disappointed in my alma mater, and concerned for the safety and well-being of trans and non-binary students, staff, and faculty currently at Northwestern.
Pax Ahimsa Gethen (they/them) is a queer Black trans writer and editor. They live in San Francisco with their spouse Ziggy.